The magnitutde of experience we have with cables versus cruise ships in 1912 is pretty different, don't you think? How many years had humanity been making rolled steel cruise ships before the Titanic? How many years have we been making cables? How many cruise ships do you think we'd made? How many cables do you think we've made? Your scare-quote just doesn't seem applicable.
It's not even a bad analogy in some ways. Some cables probably do, like the Titanic, spend their time at sea with their coal bay accidentally on fire, do spend their time with some mild internal fault sapping some power. But wow it like just doesn't matter. I'm trying to think of something combustible at incredibly low temperatures that might compound this situation, to make a 130 degree cable a potential threat, to imagine a real case for this other-people's-cable-phobia. The risk is so mild. As soon as a there's a real fault, the system shuts down; phone and charger both have a role actively agreeing to keep the power flowing, both have fault detections. The Titanic lacked these plural safeguard, it's coal bay was on fire & they couldn't put it out, greatly heating the hull.
Apple's defense is an entire religion around Fear Uncertainty & Doubt. It's the least brave, least exciting Think Different view of the world that I can imagine. I appreciate & get the value that Apple people say, that they like having well-defined paths & not having to think about things, but it seems always applied with zeal, even in cases like this, where opening up is obviously fine & better for everyone.
There are hundreds of product recalls every year, involving phones and accessories, because of electrical shock risks and/or fire hazards [0]. Also, there is little to no enforcement of PD standards, so you could be using an USB-C shaped cable, connected to a perfectly looking USB-C power adapter, and the manufacturer could claim it to deliver 2V and 7.5A, to make 15W.
You may not have any issues with that, because you know that does not look right. The vast majority of people wouldn't think twice to buy it if it were cheap enough.
[0] https://www.cpsc.gov/search?search_api_fulltext=usb&f%5B0%5D...
USB-C's minimum requirement is 20V3A, 60W. It's really not a difficult standard to meet. Your insane example of 2V 7.5A is poppycock... it would be hard as heck to make a cable that could carry 2V but not 3V or 5V. 20V is a tiny amount of voltage, the shittiest insulation will be fine. And no one wants or needs that. A 7.5A cable on the other hand would be considerably more expensive & thicker than most. It's so hard to imagine a real scenario where someone would ever make a wildly out of spec oddball cable that wouldnt just work in any circumstance. 20V is more a factor of the connector than the cable, and 3A is probably not going to be enough real current to do anything scary.
Chargers might possible catch on fire, are a fire hazard themselves, since they deal with mains power, but in this shockingly rare circumstance, i'd guess it will usually not harm a phone; it will self destruct, and the phone will disconnect ahead of time.
This sounds more more searching desperately for FUD. And more lacking any real evidence that the rest of the world is actually all catching on fire & burning down all the time.
This seems dismissive. What you are saying is that, since product recalls exist, there is no point in enforcing higher standards, not even for safety reasons.
> USB-C's minimum requirement is 20V3A, 60W. It's really not a difficult standard to meet [...] 20V is more a factor of the connector than the cable.
The literal problem here is that there are manufacturers that would not meet the minimum standards, and USB-IF and sellers do not seem to be in the mood of enforcing them either, so we are left with the other end, hardware vendors.
> This sounds more more searching desperately for FUD. And more lacking any real evidence that the rest of the world is actually all catching on fire & burning down all the time.
I don't think you understand the issue at hand.
Safety standards, generally speaking, aren't in place to avoid a 100% prevalence of accidents and/or deaths in their context, but the very low percentage of cases when the preconditions may lead to accidents and/or deaths.
In Canada last year, there were just over 140 house fires caused by phone accessories, which admittedly is not a lot, but in optimal conditions, there should be none.
If the USB-IF did their job, standards were actually enforced, and sellers and manufacturers were actually liable for the crap they sell, there should not be any discussion around this. Instead, every time a phone catches fire while charging, instead of mentioning the off-brand cable or charger, it's the phone manufacturer making the headlines, so here we are.
It's the authoritarian mindset, it's Apple-istic to demand there be some strict top-down system demanding compliance, collecting money, and relentlessly pursuing everyone else legally.
So USB-IF certification is not required. There are a variety of cables out there, of various quality, huge numbers uncertified but also more than adequate. Few even sub-par cables pose real risk. With the safeguards USB has builtin risk is tiny. I would greatly doubt the cable was a cofactor in even 2% of these 150 house fires/year.
In return, we get the benefit of much cheaper cables, that folks do review quite heavily. We also get really interesting & really useful non-compliant products, that I make use of & enjoy regularly: tiny little usb-a to usb-c female adapters[1] that are out of spec because you could concievably make a nonsense circuit & injure a product, but which are again wildly useful.
Building this world where authority & control are wired in everywhere, where we use the state & the legal system to hunt down & enforce folks on a narrow prescribed track sounds awful. There are some shitty shitty products folks can run into- yes- but mostly we're already well protected, and the market pretty quickly identifies the truly wretched; thr trade-off here, to allow an open world versus insisting on control, seems apparent to me, and those folks with the desire to use certified gear will be in great hands with usb-if gear (the idea that apple certification is "more safe" seems like a joke to me). I fail to see the case for adversarialism, that you seem to clutch for.
> It's the authoritarian mindset, it's Apple-istic to demand there be some strict top-down system demanding compliance, collecting money, and relentlessly pursuing everyone else legally.
A manufacturer that makes its devices refuse to work with products that do not comply with _standards_, set by an organisation that defines them, but refuses to enforce them, is now authoritarian.
> Building this world where authority & control are wired in everywhere, where we use the state & the legal system to hunt down & enforce folks on a narrow prescribed track sounds awful.
This is already happening, market and nation wide, and I'm glad it does.
This is not an Apple thing. There must be some control and enforcement over safety and functional standards. If you want your house to be in good standing with the state, you cannot use any sort of electricity cable for in-wall installations, or any sort of pipes for your drinking water. You could always leave if you don't agree with these rules, as you could choose not to buy Apple too.
Another point is that the market does not self regulate. That's the same stupid idea that has been disproven so many times, I'm surprised any sane person would still believe in it. Markets care more about efficiency at making money, than safety. There are countless examples of large companies weighting between safety and profits, and they choose profits every single time, because for most, in the long run, is worth it.
But overall, your position is not that of the common folk anyway. You talk about reviewers, and markets, and insist that nothing is a "risk", even when it is your belief against actual recall numbers. Maybe you should ask yourself if most people who buy their charging cables at gas stations are doing their "own research".
In the real world, bad cables just don't transfer data fast enough, or don't charge fast enough, and anything else is so rare that you might as well worry about accidentally puncturing the battery.
It's like the need to be a contrarian has gone full circle and now most HN is so contrarian they adopted child like naivety to be different from us sheeps who think maybe a publicly traded company's decision are based on profits and not tooth fairy like goodness.
I see Google as a far less centralized/top down org, with a lot more different competeing goals. Ads are evil, Android is ugly, but and there's a lot of different things happening with their web work but imo a huge swarth of it is good, and their process & trying to work with the world is admirable.
The realization that huge companies have good & bad sides, tension within, is I think a indicator of maturity. Some organizations to have high homogeneity, high organizational patterns, but top-down orgs are usually a sign of bad. There's something much more interesting & dynamic about orgs that allow internal variance, that have different viewpoints within. The Democratic Party in the US for example seems to have a quite hard time figuring out top priorites & creating cohesive messaging; there are a lot of different ideas & values, within the group, & debate about how & where to go... this has gobs of problems, but I think that tolerance of internal discourse (even though it's presence is contrary to alignmemt, even though it can bleed out) is enormously powerful, creates a far better for the org to assess it's values & align itself over time.
I'd love to see a web platform Google that operates with even one pro-web ally on the standards board, that believes in a Fugu like expansion, versus the narrow-web rest-of-universe that is out there... right now there are some places for cooperation in html/cas, but there's no real allies in growing the platform, adding new capabilities. It's been long & lonely trying to work on the web & that's a shit position, with literally every other implememter/browser being anti-feature in nature.
Your observation that contrarianism now entails defending the most money-grubbing practicies is seemingly a somewhat apt one.
Apple is a luxury consumer brand, the luxury part can't be maintained if the user experience is similar to affordable and accessible brands.
If you can't afford to pay apple fees for MFI then you have no business making apple accessories and cables. People are not technically savvy enough to blame the accessory they will blame the phone itself for low battery life, not charging fast enough, acting shitty because of accesory power drain or malfunction,etc.... MFI is a brand protection scheme.
All this complaining, because there's like a 0.0000001% chance of having a bad time is just so tiring. This belief that only extremely high walls will protect us, that Apple and Apple alone can maintain order is preposterous. It's not like your experience would be worse for intercompatibility, for being able to work with other peripherals: you could still opt to keep paying high prices to use Apple certified gear. But just the thoughts of there not being a huge god damn massive moat with alligators in it makes some folks cower, makes them think it would be their end.
And they never ever give even a token nod to how much would be possible, to the idea that maybe Apple users could & should come to expect more, if the gate weren't so high & they could see out.
> This belief that only extremely high walls will protect us, that Apple and Apple alone can maintain order is preposterous
You? Why is this about you now? This is about apple protecting their brand and profit margin not protecting users from anything.
> And they never ever give even a token nod to how much would be possible, to the idea that maybe Apple users could & should come to expect more, if the gate weren't so high & they could see out.
Use shitty android and leave us alone lol. There is a shit android phone that does all the things you want. Stop trying to push your ideals down other people's throat. Apple wants to make products a certain way and people are free to not buy apple products. End of story. If I want a locked down closed source ecosystem with proprietary peripherals and all that, who the hell are you to tell me I can't have that.
This isn't politics, buy a different product and vote with your wallet.
Personally I'd like to reason from principles, about what should be & what risks would be. If we want to discuss, I think allowing some speculation & consideration for what could be is required.
And the only arguments I see from the Stay Inside Castle Apple crowd are risk related, and they rely on the spreading of fear uncertainty & doubt, portraying a chaotic unsafe world where everything outside the castle wall is anarchy & disaster. Using fear like this is a broadly political tactic, is an argument towards a conservative outlook.
And it just feels unhinged, detached, & not reperesentative of the actual world.
No my argument is, unless apple is harming consumers in a sepecific market, this is nothing but bullying by EU. If apple marketed to all consumers then you can say it is stifling competition but since it is a high end luxury brand competitors that can't afford its rules to have their products tested and validated after a fee are not competing in the same market as apple. The entire purpose of the brand and product is to be exclusive. You people are saying exclusivity has no place in any market. Instead of competing fairly like android does you force apple and apple consumers to tolerate a marker they don't want to be part of. A lot of arguments make sense if there weren't already like a million android skus from various vendors for you to choose from. It's like you prefer apple but you want to tell apple how to run its business so it becomes like android, just be fair and use android.
> Using fear like this is a broadly political tactic, is an argument towards a conservative outlook.
This has nothing to do with politics. I used android for ages, I finally have a real usable phone and shitty policies and fanatical people like you are trying to take that away and make everything as shitty as everything else. I pay apple whatever it wants to keep the quality and exclusivity. You very well knoe plenty of android phones have better specs and are more open, I choose an inferior spec iphone precisely because it is closed source and the interface both in hardware and software are consistent and reliable and pleasant!
> And it just feels unhinged, detached, & not reperesentative of the actual world.
You can have your opinions and needs and I can have mine. I won't take away your choices from you so don't take away my one and only choice.
Consumers buy millions upon millions of cables & chargers, a huge % off brand and uncertified, and the number that have had damage to their phone or created fires is sub-microscopic.
> given that there's not a good standard out there for
Oh please. Abusrd poppycock.
The clutching of pearls for this topic is incredible. There's multiple checks and safeguards in the spec. These systems are just not as fragile as portrayed. If this were just a 48V DC connection, yeah, there'd be some risk, but this is a reasonably well defined, safe-guarded system already. And there's just so little evidence of problems, and such a huge huge install-base already. Is there anyone else on the planet with a fanbase exhibiting even half the Stockholm Syndrome of Apple?